Maximizing Chase Freedom's 4th quarter bonus

My apologies in advance that this post is a bit derivative (for way more info check out Frequent Miler's post on the same subject), but I received a request from a reader who has a couple Chase Freedom cards and wants to maximize his 4th quarter earnings. As a reminder, in the 4th quarter of 2013 you can earn up to 7,500 non-flexible Ultimate Rewards points by spending up to $1,500 at Amazon.com or "select department stores."

Amazon.com

Since Amazon.com in general doesn't participate in any shopping portals (although select categories do earn cashback through some portals), this is an opportunity to earn 5 valuable Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent on your normal Amazon.com shopping.

This is much more valuable than Discover's 5% cash back category of "online shopping" this quarter, since Discover cash back is frustrating to redeem, while non-flexible Freedom Ultimate Rewards points can be transferred to a flexible Ultimate Rewards account for transfer to Chase's valuable partners or for redemption for paid travel at 1.25 cents each.

Sears Gift Cards

This technique's a bit trickier, but Frequent Miler has done the Lord's work figuring the ins and outs of it. Basically, if you're buying gift cards online, you need to know that physical Sears gift cards are sold not by Sears, but by Kmart, and Kmart isn't a "select department store" for the purposes of this quarter's Chase Freedom bonus. If you buy eGift cards online, on the other hand, they'll be charged to your credit card by Sears, and earn you 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar.

Of course, if you have a nearby Sears store location (I don't), you can simply go to that store and buy gift cards there.  If you decide to go that route, then you can either buy Sears gift cards or you can look for what Frequent Miler calls the "secret gift card rack," where you can potentially find other, more useful gift cards.

Either way, before you make any Sears purchases you'll want to sign up for Plink, add Sears to your Plink Wallet, and make the Freedom card that you'll be using your active card.

Why should you care about Sears gift cards? Here's the fun part: on Friday Frequent Miler ALSO reported that it's possible to pay for travel using Sears gift cards, by going through Sears Vacation.

Apparently you have to make your reservation over the phone in order to use Sears gift cards, which is admittedly pretty annoying, and their prices are $10 more than you'll pay elsewhere. On the other hand, the ability to earn 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar, worth at least 6.25 cents when used for paid travel with a flexible Ultimate Rewards account, means that for flights over $267 you're strictly better off using a Sears gift card purchased with your Chase Freedom than a Chase Sapphire Preferred which earns just 2 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar, worth at least 2.5 cents in paid travel (since you're netting 3.75 cents per dollar, at which rate $267 is the break-even point for the $10 booking fee).

Of course many people value flexible Ultimate Rewards points even higher than that, which lowers the break-even point further. 

Conclusions

Those are my thoughts so far on the Chase Freedom quarterly bonus categories. As for my own plans, I was "fortunate" enough to need to buy a new Apple computer this quarter, so that was an easy way for me to use up the $1,500 cap on my Discover card. For the rest of the quarter I'll be doing my Amazon shopping with my Chase Freedom card, and then I'll spend the rest of my $1,500 Chase Freedom cap on Sears eGift Cards, which I'll use the next time I need to book a paid flight. I'm all booked up for the rest of this year, but there's no doubt I'll be buying flights again soon, hopefully at 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar.

More thoughts on Square Cash

This is a followup to yesterday's post on Square Cash, the new e-mail based online peer-to-peer payment service by the people who brought you those little white smartphone dongles. I've been experimenting with it some more, and I want to give a rundown of some of the most lucrative options that have occurred to me so far.

Rewards-earning debit cards

This one's a no-brainer: use your rewards-earning debit card to transfer up to $10,000 a month. My first transfer, from my Bank of America Alaska Airlines debit card, has already posted to my account, and appears as a normal debit card purchase (the merchant category is 7299, "Miscellaneous Personal Services (Not Elsewhere Classified)."

This makes me VERY confident that I'll earn rewards for that transaction. 

Turn your PayPal accounts into Bluebird accounts

While it doesn't apply to everyone, if you live in a region with CVS store locations that sell Vanilla Reload Network reload cards, you're probably already loading your Bluebird account with them and paying off your credit cards, or transferring the money out to your bank account.

Those same store locations will also typically sell PayPal My Cash cards, which likewise have a $3.95 activation fee for cards with up to $500 in value. If you have a PayPal Debit MasterCard linked to your personal PayPal account (it's completely free), then you can use that card to send money from your PayPal account using Square Cash.

Better yet, if you have a Business or Premier PayPal account, your Debit MasterCard also earns 1% cash back. As in the case of the Bank of America card, I'm fairly confident you'll earn rewards on these free Square Cash transactions. Consequently, you can manufacture $4,032 in spend each month at a negative cost: you'll make $40 in cash back, which more than covers the $31.60 you'll spend for PayPal Cash cards!

This option appears to be rapidly vanishing, but if you have access to PayPal My Cash cards at 7-11 store locations coded as "gas stations," you can also earn tons of points taking advantage of that common bonus category.

Experiments with other prepaid cards

Unfortunately, Square Cash doesn't accept cards that it identifies as "prepaid" cards. However, their method of identifying prepaid cards is not entirely accurate. Most gift cards have been reported as not working, while a small minority appear to work.

My Nationwide Visa Buxx card was correctly identified as prepaid cards and wasn't accepted.  My US Bank Buxx card isn't in my name, so I didn't want to risk adding it to my account.

In the course of my research on the MasterCard rePower network, I applied for the H&R Block emerald card, which is loadable using Green Dot Moneypaks and hopefully soon with Vanilla Reloads. I was able to add my emerald card to Square Cash successfully.

Conclusion

I truly believe this is a game changing development, at least for as long as it lasts, and I encourage you to start experimenting, since no one knows how long that's going to be!

Developing: Square Cash

I spend a lot of time talking about the Bank of America Alaska Airlines debit card. It's not the only rewards debit card available, but it is - in my opinion - the best (low annual fee, earns miles on PIN transactions, earns super-valuable Alaska miles). I get a lot of questions about whether the card is still available to new applications, and I can't give a straight answer, since I already have the card. However, this link still takes you to a working website, so I have no reason to believe it's not available.

The occasion for this observation is that there's a new, free method of manufacturing up to $10,000 per month using debit cards: Square Cash .

The very first thing you should do if you're interested in this technique is read this entire FlyerTalk thread and this terrific Wall Street Journal article.

Now you know everything I know. Some observations:

• People are reporting only occasional success with gift cards. If you're a gift card churner, for now you'll have to see for yourself whether the cards you have available will work with Square Cash.
• There's one report of failure using a MyVanilla Debit card. That's a shame, since this would be a terrific way to unload $2,500 per week.
• Any rewards-earning debit card should work and earn rewards (Suntrust Delta Skymiles World Check Card, Bankoh Hawaiian Airlines Visa Check Card, ufb direct Airlines Rewards Checking).
• As long as you have 2 e-mail addresses and 2 different debit cards (one to send and one to receive) , you should be able to send money to yourself. Make a small test payment to make sure it goes through.

It's still early days, so don't be surprised if the details of this deal change as we go forward. But if you've been looking for a new hack that you can get in on the ground floor of and, most importantly, share your experiences with the community, here's your chance!

Reasons to love the Midwest: US Bank ATMs

This last weekend I took a trip to beautiful Milwaukee, WI. It was a great trip, giving me the chance to fence, see a good friend and, of course, visit a US Bank ATM! That gives me the occasion to provide an update to this post from back in September. In that post I reported, based on the US Bank Visa Buxx cardholder agreement, that the limits on free US Bank ATM withdrawals are "$200 per withdrawal, 3 per 24 hour period."

I can now report that that information is incorrect . I ended up testing this because I arrived in Milwaukee Friday night, October 11, and my next US Bank Visa Buxx load day was Saturday, October 12. Since I didn't want to spend my weekend on the US Bank iPhone app looking for ATMs, I decided to try an additional $500 in ATM withdrawals Saturday morning. Here's my (successful) withdrawal history:

• 10/11/13, 19:26, $200
• 10/11/13, 19:27, $200
• 10/11/13, 19:28, $100
• 10/12/13, 16:01, $100
• 10/12/13, 16:01, $200
• 10/12/13, 16:02, $200

Now, does this make the biggest difference in the world? Of course not. For readers who don't have access to US Bank ATMs (as I myself don't have here in New England), it doesn't make any difference at all. But I want to make sure my readers have the most up-to-date information that I have, in case they find themselves passing through the Midwest with a Visa Buxx balance and want to make totally free ATM withdrawals.

In other news, I have replaced my computer so new posts and replies to comments and e-mails should return to normal. Even better, as I was writing this post I received notification from Discover that my ShopDiscover purchase was tracked successfully:

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I've never felt so good about spending $1,200...

Do this now: Hilton winter promotion

While the details of Hilton's winter promotion have been known for some time (I updated my Hotel Promotions page a few weeks ago) , registration for the promotion has finally opened.

You'll earn double base HHonors points on stays of 2 nights, triple base points on 3 night stays, and quadruple base points on stays of 4 or more nights between October 10, 2013 and January 31, 2014.

Register now, before you forget, and see the list of non-participating properties here. 

Striking out with US Bank Visa Buxx

After having a long and fruitful discussion with one of my regular readers, and reading some of the latest information in this Flyertalk thread , I decided I owed it to my readers to figure out once and for all whether it was possible to order multiple US Bank Visa Buxx cards.

There are a number of reasons why this is an interesting question. First of all, the Nationwide Visa Buxx card allows users, without any hacking whatsoever, to order a card with identical "parent" and "teen" information. However, the Nationwide card has a number of drawbacks compared to the US Bank Visa Buxx card: most importantly, a lower monthly load limit ($1,000 vs. $2,000) and a combined weekly purchase and ATM withdrawal limit of $800.

Unlike the Nationwide card, the US Bank Visa Buxx card does not allow accounts to be created with the same information for the parent and the teen. However, as I was the first blogger to report, the US Bank Visa Buxx does not actually verify in any way the information provided for the account's "teen."

This gave rise to the question of whether there was any verification process for the account's "parent." So, I decided to find out, and opened a brand new US Bank Visa Buxx account. At first, all signs were good: the online account was created, my credit card was charged, and I received an e-mail telling me my card would arrive in about 3 days.

Unfortunately, that's when my problems started. One day later, I received a voice message from a "verification department." When I logged into the "parent" account, I saw that the status of the card was "PFRAUD," instead of "ACTIVE" like my first account.

Oddly, a few days later, my new card arrived. However, when I called to activate the card, I was immediately transferred to the Customer Service department, where I was unable to make any headway activating the account. Finally, I asked for my money to be refunded, and was eventually told that it was possible, but that I would receive a check in 15-20 business days.

Conclusion

If you do decide to experiment with multiple US Bank Visa Buxx cards, here are my suggestions:

• Use a real Social Security number for the "parent" account;
• Use a different name for the "teen" account (the similarity of the names may have triggered my fraud alert);
• Make sure you use only "valid" Social Security numbers;
• Make your initial load small (I have $500 locked up in US Bank's coffers for up to month).

Bonus points at Amazon with US Bank Cash+

While Amazon.com as a rule doesn't participate in shopping portals (their partnership with Hawaiian Airlines' online mall ended earlier this year, but purchases only earned 1 Hawaiian mile per dollar, so it was no great loss), it's long been known that the Citi Forward card, which offers 5 ThankYou points per dollar spent at bookstores, would also bonus purchases made with Amazon.

Last quarter I selected bookstores (along with charity)  as one of my bonus categories with the US Bank Cash+ card, which gives 5% cash back in two categories of your choice each quarter, and made a little over $100 in purchases at Amazon to see if US Bank would treat these purchases the same as Citi. And sure enough when my statement closed today, I saw that for $126.95 in Amazon purchases, I had earned $6.35 in cash back:

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Although both the Discover More/it and Chase Freedom are bonusing Amazon.com purchases this calendar quarter, this is a great option to earn 5% cash back at Amazon during the rest of the year. And if you spend less than $1,500 on Amazon purchases, you can earn the rest of your cash back through bonused Kiva loans.

Free online debit loads to Bluebird

A few days ago there was an uptick in interest in Bluebird, when cardholders received an e-mail telling us that from now on online debit card loads would be free.

For a little background, debit card loads in-store at Walmart have always been free, and capped at $1,000 per day and $5,000 per month, a limit that's shared with Vanilla Reload Network loads. The low cap is unfortunate, but this does give the flexibility to use the $5,000 cap to drain gift cards or Visa Buxx cards, if that's a more lucrative option for you than buying Vanilla Reload Network cards, as it is for some people.

I had a bit of trouble setting up my Bluebird account for online debit loads, so I want to share my experience and let you know what to expect if you decide to take advantage of this new free option.

The Card

I decided to add my business PayPal debit card, which earns 1% cash back on signature and online transactions, and is loadable using PayPal My Cash cards. The principle here is that I can load my PayPal account with $1,000 at a cost of $7.90, then drain the account at 1% cash back, earning $10. In this way I'll manufacture $1,008 in lucrative gas station spend, and a small profit of $2.10.

The Problem

The card was successfully added to my account, but I wasn't able to add funds. Instead, I received this curious error message: 

This request cannot be completed at this time. Your Permanent Bluebird card must be activated before adding money using your bank account. If you’ve received your Permanent Bluebird card and already activated it, please call Account Protection Services at 1.800.660.2454. Our hours of operation are 9am - 8pm EST, Monday - Friday. If not, your Permanent Bluebird card will be delivered within 7-10 business days of your completed registration.

A quick trip to Flyertalk revealed that I wasn't the only one experiencing this problem. However, I was able to continue loading my account normally using Vanilla Reload Network cards, and bill pay out the funds, so the whole situation was extremely murky.

The Solution

A few days later, I received a call from Bluebird's "Account Protection Services," who asked me to verify that I had an account, and that I was trying to add debit cards to it. I confirmed that, and she then asked me to fax in a copy of my driver's license and the front of the debit cards I was trying to add. 

After a quick trip to the office, I called back to make sure they'd received my fax.  It took the representative 3 tries to find it, but when she did, she was immediately able to verify my name and the card numbers of my debit cards, and lifted the hold on my account.

I then logged back into Bluebird and was able to successfully load $100 from my PayPal debit card. 

Conclusion

Here are my thoughts on online debit loads so far:

• Don't be worried if you aren't immediately able to use a new debit card – you may have to go through the same slightly inconvenient process;
• Be sure to only add debit cards that have your name on the front. Anonymous gift cards could cause real problems with your account; 
• The $1,000 monthly limit on debit card loads is in addition to your $5,000 monthly in-store and Vanilla Reload limit; 
• You can set up 10 recurring $100 loads each month, so you don't have to log in to Bluebird each day;
• But if you do, be sure you have enough money in your debit card account to cover the scheduled transactions!

What are your experiences with online debit loads? 

What's next: product changes

Since my April round of applications, I haven't applied for any new credit cards (although I have done a few product changes, which – usually – don't involve a "hard pull" of your credit report). That's been for a few reasons. I've already got the two most lucrative credit cards for hassle-free manufactured spend: the Citi ThankYou Preferred card with 5 ThankYou points per dollar spent at drug stores (no longer available online, and in-branch applications have reported a high failure rate), and the Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard, which earns 2.22 cents in value per dollar spent. Using just those two cards, I'm able to pay off student loans at pennies on the dollar (made even better using my favorite hack, now featuring Plink), and pay for hotels and airline tickets at about a 65% discount (while earning points for those paid flights and stays). Add in my Delta Business Platinum American Express card, which earns 1.4 Skymiles per dollar at the $25,000 and $50,000 spend levels, and that accounts for just about all of my manufactured spend budget (although I can't resist maintaining a 50,000 Club Carlson point balance, good for two free nights at any Club Carlson property in the world).

While it's still true that you'll never earn more points per dollar than you do meeting a minimum spending requirement, I have no interest in scoring every single signup bonus before I'm 30. That's why I focus on putting spending on the wildly lucrative cards I already have, instead of applying for 3-4 new cards every 91 days.

However, my year of manning the mint with Citi ends with my January statement, and my first Barclaycard annual fee is due in April, so naturally I've turned my mind towards the future. In this occasional series I'll share my thoughts on my next moves. Today's edition: product changes!

American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass

This is a card I've been eyeing since I finally found PIN-enabled Visa gift cards at a local supermarket. Earning 6 HHonors points per dollar spent at grocery stores, and 50,000 HHonors points for upgrading my current, no-annual-fee version of the card, seems like a great value proposition, even at $75 for the first year.

To illustrate this, take a property I love in a city I love, the Hilton Prague Old Town (the Hilton Prague hotel is even more spectacular, but slightly less convenient), which in June (high season) goes for 50,000 points per night. Obviously I'll earn one free night just for upgrading, which makes that night cost about $75, or a little less (depending on whether you decide to prorate the $75 annual fee over all the additional points you earn, or just over the upgrade bonus – the latter is slightly more accurate but much more complicated). The advance purchase rate in June is around $250 after taxes, so you're paying about 30 cents on the dollar.

If I were able to aggressively manufacture spend on the Surpass card at grocery stores, I could earn additional nights after every $8,333 in spend. If that takes the form of Visa gift cards at a cost of $5.95 per $500 card, I'd be paying around $101.15 per night, or $80.92 if I redeem my points in batches of 5 nights, with the 5th night free, a 60-68% discount. In other words, it's a good workhorse of a card (for the first year), but not one that offers incredibly outsized value.

Unfortunately, recently my local supermarket...stopped allowing gift card sales to credit cards. Until I find a more reliable source, I'm shelving the upgrade.

Citi Dividend Platinum Select

While this card does typically offer a small signup bonus of $100 in Dividend Dollars for new applicants (although it has also reached as high as $300), I'm more interested in the rotating 5% cash back categories. Unlike the Chase Freedom and Discover More/it, the Dividend Platinum Select's cap on bonused earnings is annual, instead of quarterly, meaning that a single lucrative quarter (2013 offered drug stores in Quarter 1) allows you to max out $300 in Dividend Dollars. Since I won't be using my ThankYou Preferred card after mid-January, it's an obvious candidate for a product change.

Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard - No Annual Fee

I currently have the $89 annual fee version of this card, which I've explained before is only worth carrying for the first, fee-free year. Barclaycard does have a reputation for offering annual fee waivers (or statement credits for their cards' annual fees) to good customers, so my intention is to call in April to ask if they'll offer me an $89 statement credit. After all, I am a VERY good customer. If not, then I'll call back and ask for a product change to the no-annual-fee version of the card, keeping my credit history with Barclaycard and any points I've stockpiled. Since the redemption structure is actually identical for the $89 and fee-free cards, I won't lose any of my points' value when I make the product change.

In future installments in this series I'll be discussing the cards I'll be canceling outright and the new cards I'll be applying for in the new year.

Breaking: Does the latest VR redesign change everything?

Reports are already trickling out on Flyertalk about the latest redesign of Vanilla Reload Network reload cards. In the last 24 hours, I've purchased all three generations of reload cards. Here's a "VR Classic:"

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American Express on this card was widely understood to refer to the hyper-lucrative Bluebird product, and MyVanilla refers to MyVanilla Debit cards, which my readers are familiar with. This version also includes a few additional account options, including the "momentum" prepaid visa, a product I've been meaning to investigate for a while, but that has extremely limited geographic distribution in the United States. Mio is a product that's already been thoroughly investigated, and unfortunately their risk management department is extremely intolerant of what they perceive as abusive behavior.  The same is true of netSpend.

Then I found a slightly newer generation of Vanilla Reload network reload card:

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Here you see the addition of American Express Serve, which is a terrific product, but unfortunately you're not allowed to have an active Serve account and an active Bluebird account at the same time. There's also the addition of the PayPal Prepaid MasterCard, which is NOT the same thing as the PayPal Business Debit MasterCard you can apply for if you have a "Business" or "Premier" PayPal account, and which offers 1% cash back on signature purchases. Instead, it's a fairly abusive prepaid debit product for the under-banked.

Finally, here's the latest generation of Vanilla reload card I picked up today:

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Here we see two new additions. Something called Money Network (which appears to be a mostly-scammy Bluebird competitor) But what, you ask, is MasterCard rePower? Good question.

It appears that MasterCard has developed an integrated reload network for all the prepaid debit products that are linked to the MasterCard payment network. This has – traditionally – only mattered if you were lucky enough to live in an area where retailers (Rite Aid is the classic example) allow the sale of Green Dot Moneypaks with credit cards. However, with the addition of Vanilla Reload Network functionality and the widespread ability to purchase reload cards with a credit card, the ability to manufacture spend has potentially just smashed through all previously understood limits.

To put it mildly, there are a lot of options for MasterCard prepaid debit cards. 

Now, there are a lot of products on that list, and it's guaranteed that not all of them will pan out. High fees, low limits, and the absence of a bill pay feature are going to necessarily make some of those prepaid debit card products useless for manufacturing spend. However, my anticipation is that at least some of them are going to prove to be lucrative enough to double or triple my monthly manufactured spend. 

As always, you'll find the latest updates on all these products right here on the blog. I intend to work my way through all the most promising options, and will report back as I encounter success and failure.